He laughed at her joke and sipped his beer.

“It’s a dog,” he said, putting a square napkin under the glass. “A fluffy one with a fucked up face. Shanna sent me a picture of it.” He scrolled through an uneventful text conversation and showed Natalie a fuzzy picture of a particularly weird-looking, brown Pekingese.

“That’s gotta be genetic, right?”

He gave it another look.

“Uh oh. What if that’s Shanna?”